Cabin is an interesting experiment; an attempt to compete with airlines by promising a better night’s sleep. Flying between the two cities may take less than an hour and a half. But getting to the airport, shuffling through the security queue, waiting at the gate, picking up your bag upon arrival, and getting from the airport to your actual destination can nearly quadruple the total travel time. That means a trip can eat up most of the day. Or if you want to travel at night, you have about an hour to sleep, between several hours of hassle and tedium.

That’s among the reasons, why I prefer the night train to wherever place possible in europe :)

Here’s how Haven might work: You lock your laptop in a hotel safe — not a secure move on its own — and place your Haven phone on top of it. If someone opens the safe while you’re away, the phone’s light meter might detect a change in lighting, its microphone might hear the safe open (and even the attacker speak), its accelerometer might detect motion if the attacker moves the laptop, and its camera might even capture a snapshot of the attacker’s face. The Haven app will log all of this evidence locally on the Android device.

We recently built a distributed cron job scheduling system on top of Kubernetes, an exciting new platform for container orchestration. Kubernetes is very popular right now and makes a lot of exciting promises: one of the most exciting is that engineers don’t need to know or care what machines their applications run on.

Distributed systems are really hard, and managing services on distributed systems is one of the hardest problems operations teams face. Breaking in new software in production and learning how to operate it reliably is something we take very seriously. As an example of why learning to operate Kubernetes is important (and why it’s hard!), here’s a fantastic postmortem of a one-hour outage caused by a bug in Kubernetes.

There will also be those who will criticize me and say that I’ve acted irresponsibly, but that’s completely missing the point. The real point is that if somebody like me with no previous hacking background was able to do what I did, then somebody better than me could’ve done far worse things to the Internet in 2017. I’m not the problem and I’m not here to play by anyone’s contrived rules. I’m only the messenger. The sooner you realize this the better.

A good read from an individual that singlehandedly made the internet a bit better.

“Damn. If only there was some system which allowed you to follow updates to blogs and websites you care about in a manner that ensured you never missed an update, could find new updates at a glance, and didn’t have to wade through masses of noise to do so. …Hey, this would be a great idea for a startup!”

“We got the airplane on Sept. 19, 2016. Two days later, I was successful in accomplishing a remote, non-cooperative, penetration,” Hickey said in an article in Avionics Today. “[That] means I didn’t have anybody touching the airplane; I didn’t have an insider threat. I stood off using typical stuff that could get through security, and we were able to establish a presence on the systems of the aircraft.”

Right now, limited as we are by human programmers using methods that haven’t changed much in 30 years, software is just nibbling at the world. And that won’t scale. We need more software. A lot more software. And humans are the bottleneck.

With an extremely narrow range of exceptions, government censorship of the Internet is prohibited by Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and by Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which guarantee everyone’s right to receive and impart information and ideas regardless of frontiers. The Spanish government’s censorship of online speech during the Catalonian referendum period is so wildly disproportionate and overbroad, that its violation of these instruments seems almost beyond dispute.

To improve Bluetooth, platform vendors like Apple and Google are riffing on top of it, and that means they’re building custom solutions. And building custom solutions means they’re taking the opportunity to prioritize their own products, because that is a fair and rational thing for platform vendors to do.

Preach!

The playbook is simple: last year, Apple dropped the headphone jack and replaced it with its W1 system, which is basically a custom controller chip and software management layer for Bluetooth. The exemplary set of W1 headphones is, of course, AirPods, but Apple also owns Beats, and there are a few sets of W1 Beats headphones available as well. You can still use regular Bluetooth headphones with an iPhone, and you can use AirPods as regular Bluetooth headphones, but the combination iPhone / W1 experience is obviously superior to anything else on the market. No one else can make W1 headphones, and obviously no one else can modify iOS to support their own custom wireless Bluetooth riff. So your choices are the four W1 headphones, and then a large market of second-class citizens.

Tracking police activity was one of the largest priorities for the Catalan activists on the day of the vote. A user-generated map quickly started getting shared around. “There was a map, a Google map, with points where the police had been and you could see different colors. I don’t know who made it,” Rosique said.

No software system on the planet is today fully failure-resistant. Given this, it becomes crucial for software teams to be able to deal with major production incidents in a nimble way. However, just as complex systems fail, responding to a major system outage is a painful operational exercise that may at times require multiple stakeholders to work together. In this talk, Aish discusses how to efficiently deal with the human element, when complex systems fail.

Do you want a black rectangle or a white one? A slightly bigger rectangle or a thinner rectangle? The rectangle with a camera bump or without it?

this is so true ;)

When was the last time you bought a new laptop? Chances are you’re reading this on something you bought four or five years ago. The same is happening to phones right now and the iPhone X is likely the last device that will matter in the category.

As “Phones” (read PocketDatacenters) become vastly powerful the need of getting a new one every year drops.

Apple’s bet in removing the headphone jack was that we could stomach some short-term inconvenience for the longer-term benefits of freeing up valuable real estate inside the phone. It was a calculated risk, intended in part to also force the development of better wireless and digital gear by headphone makers.

It uses an absolutely stunning amount of power. The ever-expanding racks of processors used by miners already consume as much electricity as a small city. It’s a problem that experts say is bad and getting worse.

My biggest point of criticism on bitcoin. The amount of energy burned for “nothing”

“My dad had guns and hunted. So guns were always around when I was a boy,” says gun owner and hunting enthusiast Árni Leósson. “When I got older I got really into fly-fishing and from there I got interested in hunting but to do that I had to get my own guns. It was just pragmatism and I think the reason gun crime is so alien in Iceland is the ‘gun culture.’ In Iceland guns are for practical things like hunting and not for protection. We have the police for that.”

The new developer advocate role at Microsoft appears to be less about forcing Microsoft technology down people’s throats and more about meeting them where they are, identifying promising open-source cloud projects and helping out in whatever capacity makes the most sense. Sure, the goal is to still convince them that Azure is the best place for their workloads, but more in the sense of understanding what cutting-edge developers want and working to provide those services in Azure.

One or two days a week is probably the ideal amount of time to work from home, suggests Bloom. “You don’t want to go much higher because you risk jeopardizing the cohesion of your team.” As companies compete to hire and retain the best employees, being able to offer the option to work from home can sweeten the deal. “The need to go into a workplace five days a week started because people had to go to a factory and make products,” he says. “But companies that still treat employees like that are increasingly finding themselves at a disadvantage.”